Take Barack Obama. He has gone from mild
displeasure with Israel to downright antipathy. Who would have believed that
Iranian leaders who just ordered bombing runs on a mock U.S. carrier could be
treated with more deference than the prime minister of Israel?

Hillary Clinton likewise has gone from a rather
run-of-the-mill liberal grandee to
a political grafter.The problem
with Hillary's scandals are not just that they reveal a lack of character, but
that they are illiberal to the core on hallmark progressive issues of concern
for equality, transparency and feminism.

Attorney General Eric Holder came into office alleging
racism and calling the American people cowards, and six years later is exiting,
still blaming racism for his own self-inflicted failures. He leaves office as a
caricature of incompetence and racial divisiveness.

Conspiracists once warned us that the government was buying
up ammo to prevent private gun owners from purchasing it; now we learn that Obama
by executive order may ban the most popular type of sporting ammunition.

The world is a mess, but what will it look like a year from
now? No one knows with certainty, but informed guesses can be made, in part,
based on the direction of the economies in conflicted areas of the world.

Global debt (including that of the United States) is now a
higher percentage of global gross domestic product than it was before the Great
Recession that began in December 2007, making the world increasingly vulnerable
to a new financial crisis.

Here is a sample of countries that are facing economic
problems and foreign policy conflicts, with the exception of Switzerland -
which is included as a benchmark for good government, and economic and personal
liberty. What will they be like in 12 months?

Normally, what politicians say matters a whole lot less than
what they do (or don't do). But there are times when a great speech by a great
leader can bring clarity to the confused, hope to the despairing, bolster the
resolve of a people to do what must be done at a critical moment in history.

2014 was the biggest year for terror in 45 years.

The Conservative Political Action Conference began
Thursday.The most popular speaker so
far has been Scott
Walker.Now that he's clearly
the frontrunner,
the Lying Swine have been going after him hammer and tongs.

Mandalay, Burma.This is a country struggling to enter the 21st
century after being stuck in the 19th for the last half of the 20th.

One of the results is an Internet that barely
functions.I have heard little of what
is going on in the US and the world save for headlines, which are so
irretrievably awful that I'm glad I'm isolated here or else my head would
explode.

I'll keep this short.Everything you are seeing right now with America coming apart at the
seams at the hands of this Affirmative Action President has one and only one
cause:they are the wages of white
guilt.

The one and only reason this evil, contemptible
America-hating fascist has not been impeached for treason, the only reason
anyone paid any attention to him whatever such that he was accepted to Harvard,
made Editor of the Harvard Law Review, allowed to teach a course at Columbia,
ran for Illinois State Senator, ran for Illinois US Senator, ran for the Dem
presidential nomination, excused for attending a racist church for 20 years
that prayed for God to damn America, got elected president, and re-elected
president is the color of his skin.

Absolutely none of this whatever would have happened if his
skin were white.

Journalists incurious in 2008 about Barack Obama’s college grades, and how he got into Harvard Law School, or his associations with radical Islamists are morbidly curious about why Scott Walker dropped out of Marquette University, and with what he believes about evolution.

The questions linger only in Mr. Farenthold’s feverish imagination. Gov. Walker said left Marquette because the Red Cross offered him a good job. Unlike Barack Obama, he gave his college permission to release his academic records. He was a student in good standing when he left, Marquette confirmed.

For conservatives, who value accomplishment, this is a non-issue. Scott Walker has had a successful career, despite not having a college diploma. Dropouts Steven Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) have done all right too.

But for liberals, who value credentials, not having a college degree indicates stupidity (if the dropout is a Republican).

The difference between credentials and actual knowledge and accomplishment was starkly illustrated last week by Deputy State Department spokesperson Marie Harf.

Americans believe our nation is facing some substantial
challenges. Government spending is out of control. Terrorists seek to destroy
our way of life. Our economic recovery has been slow. Our borders aren't
secure. The federal government has usurped powers that rightly belong to our
states.

And every day across Wisconsin, and as I travel the nation,
I hear from people who share with me their worries about - and their hopes for
- our country.

They worry about whether their children in college will be
able to find a good job after graduation. And as a dad with two sons in
college, I worry right along with them.

So Rajendra Pachauri
has finally announced his resignation from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) - a decision at once momentous and spectacularly irrelevant.

It's momentous because the IPCC is one of the world's most
powerful organizations, with presidents and prime ministers across the globe in
thrall to its prognostications of climate doom, and the fate of nations and
economies partly decided by its ongoing insistence (against all evidence) that
"global warming" remains a credible crisis which can only be solved by throwing
stupendous quantities of taxpayer money at it.

And it's spectacularly irrelevant because the bearded,
cricket-loving, ice-shunning groper was never more than an empty figurehead,
probably chosen - a bit like UN Secretaries General - because he fitted the
right ethnic and socio-political profile rather than because he had a
particular skill set which qualified him especially for the job.

He was, after all, a railway engineer by training, not a
physicist or a meteorologist or a climatologist. I'm not making this up.

An American friend recently sent me a gift here in England as
a thank you for a weekend's hospitality. It arrived in the form of a card from
the Post Office telling me to pay a hefty sum of tax before the item itself (a
wooden bowl) could be delivered.

Had my friend been Scottish or French or from the next village
there would have been no charge. What business has government putting a tariff
barrier between two friends?

Last week the British Conservative party chairman Grant
Shapps delivered a passionate defense of free trade of the kind
that used to come from the radicals in the days of the Corn Laws 200 years ago but
these days is rarely heard from any part of the political spectrum. Crucially,
he took the perspective of the consumer, not the producer.

The free trade debate that used to be such a huge part of
British politics is re-emerging because of the trade agreement being negotiated
between the United States and the European Union, the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership or TTIP. It's
driving the Lefties batty.That's fun
and here's why.

How would you feel if you had to have bodyguards anytime you moved about — not because you were a voluntary celebrity, such as a presidential candidate or movie star, but merely because you exercised your free speech right by publishing cartoons that some found offensive?

Danish journalist Flemming Rose published cartoons of Muhammad in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten back in 2006, which led to many violent riots by Moslems around the world. He has written a book, “The Tyranny of Silence: How One Cartoon Ignited a Global Debate on the Future of Free Speech” (the English edition was just published by the Cato Institute Press).

Mr. Rose, rather than hiding, even though a fatwa has been leveled against him calling for his death, has traveled and spoken widely in his unrelenting advocacy of free speech and against the tyranny of silence. He has argued that “the lesson from the Cold War is: If you give in to totalitarian impulses once, new demands follow. The time is now to shut down Islamic Terrorism's financial network.

Inle Lake, Burma.This is the first of a "Notes" series, a
running commentary on where I am as I make my way across the world to the Vegas
Rendezvous in late April.We start in
Burma, where I have been for the past week.These are my impressions so far.

*Burma - 25 years ago the socialist military dictatorship
insisted the name be changed to "Myanmar," but I along with most everyone else
still call it Burma - is just emerging from a hermit socialism isolated from
the world, and at a breakneck pace.

The contrast can be jarring.You see oxcarts with the farmer holding the reins to the oxen in one
hand, and making a cell phone call with the other.But overall, the "energy" of Burma is one of
gentle serenity.Even in Rangoon where
the traffic is horrendous, there's no road rage of any kind, no honking horns.

Outside of Rangoon, almost no one drives fast, frantic to
get where they are going.People proceed at a measured pace, they don't
race; everyone makes room for everyone, whether an oxcart, a pedicab, a
motorbike, car, bus or truck.Every
smile is returned, and every wave.It's
easy to see why the British fell in love with Burma - it's the people, their
gentleness, their serenity of soul.

This might not be a good time to remind New Englanders digging out from a “Biblical” series of storms that a year ago this month a writer in the New York Times predicted “the end of snow.”

In 8 of 14 winters since the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said “milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms,” the snow extent in North America has been greater than average, according to the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University.

Last year was the earth’s warmest since 1880, said NASA’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies Jan. 16.

Which was odd, because according to the National Climatic Data Center, last winter was the coldest since 2009-2010; last summer the coolest since 2009. Temperatures recorded at stations of the Global Historical Climatology Network from Jan. 1 through May 6 were the lowest ever.

How do the coldest winter and summer in four years, the coldest Spring ever recorded add up to the warmest year?

They don’t. Here's how science has disgraced itself with warmist deceit.

There are decades of stories about corporations, movie actors, artists and politicians hiding money from the taxman. Many economic studies have shown that once tax rates exceed 20 percent, most people will start thinking about and then acting in legal or illegal ways to avoid the tax bill.

The reason there is so little remorse about tax avoidance and evasion is that virtually everyone knows that much of what government does is a ripoff. If people really believed that "government is underresourced" and spends its money wisely, they would not take legal charitable and other deductions when they file their income taxes.

The president's buddy, Al Sharpton, is welcome at the White House almost any time, even though the Internal Revenue Service reportedly claims he owes millions in unpaid taxes. If Mr. Sharpton had robbed a supermarket of a mere $10,000, it is unlikely he would be welcome at the White House.
The message is obvious. The government even tells us that federal employees, including thousands at the IRS, owe billions in back taxes, yet little is done. At the same time IRS leaders have the unmitigated gall to demand larger budgets.

Every thinking person implicitly knows that the U.S. government is the world's biggest financial fraudster. Here's what to do about it.

Last week (2/09), apropos of seemingly nothing, in an interview
with Mathew Yglesias from the Vox.com website, Obama was asked about
terrorism. In his answer the president said the terrorism threat is overrated.
And that was far from the most disturbing statement he made.

Moving from the general to the specific, Obama referred to
the jihadists who committed last month's massacres in Paris as "a bunch of
violent vicious zealots," who "randomly shot a bunch of folks in a deli in
Paris."

In other words, Ahmedy Coulibaly, the Moslem terrorist at
Hyper Cacher, the kosher supermarket he targeted, was just some zealot. The
Jews he murdered while they were shopping for Shabbat were just "a bunch of
folks in a deli," presumably shot down while ordering their turkey and cheese
sandwiches.

Obama's statement about the massacre of Jews in Paris is
notable first and foremost for what it reveals about his comfort level with
anti-Semitism. The bottom line is that he is embracing anti-Semitism and Islamic fascism more nakedly by the day. Let us count the ways.